Rather than a comprehensive, life-and-times biography like his previous book on Pompey, this new book is Pompey in World War I in his own words.

Ross has collected Pompey’s words from wherever he could find them — letters, diaries, orders, speeches, newspapers, battle reports, award recommendations, documents in his brigade’s diary, etc etc — and shaped excerpts into a sequence that reads like a narrative. Pompey provides extraordinary content for a book of this kind because again and again what he writes and says is so frank, forthright, emotional and controversial.

Many first-person accounts by Australians in World War I have been published, but this one is very different, for two main reasons — the way it’s been created, and its exceptionally vivid and candid content.